Monday, April 24, 2006

Web experiments

Sorry, I am not posting a lot currently... I am out of ideas.

But, yesterday, I had an interesting idea! One of the biggest problems for researchers (in general and in stuttering) is to get enough people to participate in their experiments. Typically, you need between 10 and 20 people, and often one control group and one stuttering group. This is not easy, and you need to advertise your experiment, get 20-30 people to agree to participate, schedule 20-30 meetings, and do 20-30 experiment.

Why can you not do the experiments via the web? You can reach many more people, and 20-30 will always participate. The easiest experiments are questionaires: just create a webpage with a form structure and a database behind. This is a standard technique. But you can also do more sophisticated experiments. For example, the experimental subject uses a software where he needs to press some button or react to a visual stimuli. Such software can be written in Java, and using Java Web Start they run on your computer via your webbrowser.

But as with all interesting ideas, the idea is 5%, and 95% is implementation... :-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice idea, Tom.

Fortunately, people I know have been working in this for some time.

See this page for more details.
http://www.webexp.info/

Cheers

Robin